UC Berkeley Press Release

Hearst hosts Native American Heritage events

By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations | 02 November 2006

BERKELEY – The University of California, Berkeley's Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology will host a series of free lectures, tours, a film and performances during November to celebrate American Indian Heritage Month.

The lecture series will feature public talks by museum curators and scholars who utilize the museum's Native American collections. They will highlight the objects' immense value in teaching and research.

The Hearst museum is famous worldwide for its collection of California Indian artifacts and has some 300,000 catalogued items that range in size from full-sized tule reed canoes to miniature Pomo baskets. Some of these items are in a permanent exhibition called the Native Californian Cultures Gallery that opened at the museum in 2002.

The November programs will take place at the museum, which is located on campus near the intersection of Bancroft Way and College Avenue.

"The key thing is that the museum is really striving to foster good relations with the tribes and also wants the public to benefit from these outreach programs," said Kent Lightfoot, acting director of the museum and a UC Berkeley professor of archaeology.

The series begins today (Thursday, Nov. 2) at 7 p.m. with a presentation by Nelson Graburn, a UC Berkeley professor of anthropology, on the uniqueness of the Hearst museum's collection of Alaska Native materials collected between 1868 and 1896.

American Indian Heritage Month moves into full swing at the museum on Saturday, Nov. 4, from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. with performances by Edwardo F. Madril, John-Carolos Perea and the Laguna Pueblo Buffalo Dancers; tours of the museum's Native California Cultures Gallery with Otis Parris, the museum's cultural attache; and an Indian taco sale.

On Thursday, Nov. 9, Parrish will discuss and narrate "Pomo Shaman," a documentary about his late mother, Essie Parrish, a Kashaya Pomo healer. The film was produced by Samuel Barrett, who earned the first Ph.D. in anthropology at UC Berkeley in 1908. Later in his life, Barrett worked on the American Indian Films Project, which was funded by the National Science Foundation. "Pomo Shaman," part of that project, will be shown at 7 p.m.

How museums represent native people will be the focus of a 7 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 16, presentation by Amy Lonetree, an assistant professor of anthropology at Portland State University and a 2004-2006 UC Berkeley Chancellor's Post-Doctoral Fellow. Lonetree is a member of the Ho-Chunk tribe.

"Indigenizing the Museum" will be the topic of a 7 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 30, lecture by Majel Boxer, a UC Berkeley doctoral candidate in ethnic studies. Boxer belongs to the Sisseton/Wahpeton Dakota tribe.

The Hearst Museum is open Wednesday through Sunday. For more information, call (510)643-7649 or visit the museum's Web site at http://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu.